Cynical Cinema

The rating on The Forbidden Kingdom is PG-13.  At least, on the box, that’s what it says.  Frankly, this is one of the least violent PG-13 movies I have ever seen.  There is no swearing, and not one single boob.  I think people see “kung-fu” and immediately think there must be enough violence to justify a PG-13.  But only a few kung-fu movies are truly brutal and bloody and violent.  And The Forbidden Kingdom is certainly not one of them.  Many kung-fu movies could well be considered kids’ fare, and I think this is one of them.  The martial arts scenes, while they are good and well choreographed by Yuen Woo Ping (Kill Bill, Fearless, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon), they are for the most part bloodless and at times almost cartoonish.

This movie appears to be made for children, and now is the time to do that, what with the success of the amazing Kung Fu Panda recently.  The key here is Jackie Chan.  His American movies, for the most part, have been kids’ movies.  The teaming of Chan and Jet Li is, in a sense, historic.  But teaming Li with Chow Yun-Fat would have made, one would assume, for a far more violent and dark outing.  The Forbidden Kingdom is a breezy, silly, comedic film about a staff, a monkey king, and a drunken master.  No one plays the drunken master quite like Jackie Chan, and no one plays a monkey kung-fu king quite like Jet Li.

That being said, the movie isn’t all that good.  After all, this is the teaming of Jet Li and Jackie Chan.  And the star is a young white kid?  Michael Angarano finds a staff, gets transported back into ancient China, and embarks on a quest to return the staff to the monkey king.  He is accompanied by two teachers, Li and Chan, who have a sort of half-assed rivalry between themselves.  He encounters a young Chinese girl, for the purposes of having a romantic entanglement.  And then there are the bad guys, like the Jade King and his main assassin, a ruthless woman with long white hair.  All the kung-fu movie cliches are present in this film, and while it seems as though they are trying to pay homage to the tradition of kung-fu flicks, it sometimes feels more like they are going through the motions.

The kung-fu action is pretty good, if cartoonish.  The story is weak, but standard.  The one thing I really liked about this movie, however, is that the young kid at the centre of the whole thing makes some sense.  Usually, in a kung-fu film, when someone is destined to do something, they are either a martial arts master who has been trained since birth, or they have some kind of magical power that is unleashed after three weeks of training with a master.  In this case, after his all-too-brief training with Li and Chan, Jason is NOT that good at martial arts.  He can’t defeat the Jade King, or his assassin, on his own.  After all, he’s been trained for a mere three weeks.  He needs Jet Li and Jackie Chan to come to his rescue at the end.  And that is the most original thing about this movie.

Not a great movie for kung-fu buffs, not the brilliance one would hope for from the pairing of Chan and Li, and not exactly earth-shattering.  But for the kids, who are riding the kung-fu wave after Kung-Fu Panda, this is a pretty great film to watch as a follow-up.

Flashpoint opens with a short montage of Donnie Yen performing some impressive acts of police brutality in his pursuit of criminals. This lands him, within the first two minutes of the film, in front of internal affairs. Then the internal affairs thing is forgotten for the rest of the movie. It would just interfere with the leg-breaking and gunfights and bad-ass martial arts if he had to worry about who he was hurting and killing. Yen’s brother, you see, is also a cop - one who is in deep undercover with a dangerous and evil criminal organization. This gang is almost as good with the crazy kung-fu moves as Yen himself. Almost. Pay close attention, that will be important information at the end of the movie.

The gang is taken down, and the trial is going to happen, but witnesses start getting killed, and so do some cops. Hong Kong martial arts movies love killing cops, even when the cops are the heroes. In fact, especially when they are. And they also love to have tightly-bonded families, devoted brotherhood, and vengeance. Oh, and they’re also alla bout the lonely cops, loner cops, and possible-problem-drinker cops. Like Bruce Willis, with kung-fu and way more guns. And Flashpoint is no exception. All of these standard Asian action movie stereotypes are in place, and there is nothing new about this film at all.

However, it is good. Flashpoint, in fact, is very good. The gunfights are expertly choreographed, the action is fantastic, the story moves along at a lightning pace, the actors are suitably bad-ass, and Donnie Yen is at his best, sort of a Bruce Lee type - combining Jet Li’s fast and brutal abilities with Clint Eastwood’s dangerous stare. The final showdown is everything you could want from a martial arts movie and more. Not only are there high-flying attacks, hardcore kicking and punching and arm breaking and leg twisting, but there is a real UFC-type feel to the scene, as well as a tip of the hat to hockey fighting. Everything in the world of hand-to-hand combat is thrown at the wall here, and it all sticks. One of the most impressive climactic fights in modern Asian cinema. Flashpoint comes out, courtesy of Alliance Films, on May 27th.